Internet technology has transformed the manner in which rental vehicle service providers do business with their customers. However, due to the impersonal nature of the Internet, a need exists in the art for rental vehicle service providers to increasingly personalize and streamline their reservation booking websites to meet customers' varied needs and desires.
Toward this end, the commonly-owned related patent applications referenced above disclosed a variety of deep-linking techniques through which users can directly jump into a reservation booking website while bypassing some form of data entry for a reservation. The present invention builds upon these deep-linking concepts to provide a deep-linking experience that is highly personalized to individual customers.
With these deep-links, some characteristic of a rental vehicle reservation is pre-selected. The pre-selected characteristic(s) for the deep-linked reservation can be any aspect of the rental vehicle reservation that a user would typically need to provide to the rental vehicle service provider to book and/or open a booked rental vehicle reservation. Examples of such reservation characteristics include any of the following, either singly or in combination with one or more other characteristics: a pick-up location (or range of eligible pick-up locations selected from all possible pick-up locations) for the reservation, a drop-off location (or range of eligible drop-off locations selected from all possible drop-off locations) for the reservation, a starting date (or range of eligible starting dates selected from all possible starting dates) for the reservation, an ending date (or range of eligible ending dates selected from all possible ending dates) for the reservation, a vehicle type (or range of eligible vehicle types selected from all possible vehicle types) for the reservation, a rate for the reservation (or range of eligible rates depending upon other reservation characteristics selected by the user), a collision/damage protection product (or range of eligible collision/damage protection products selected from all possible protection products—e.g., collision and damage waivers, damage waivers, personal accident insurance, supplemental liability protection, personal effects coverage, etc.), and an ancillary vehicle product (or range of eligible ancillary vehicle products selected from all possible ancillary vehicle products) for the reservation (e.g., a car seat, ski rack, etc.), a customer profile with which the reservation is to be associated, and the like. It should be noted that this pre-selection can include a restriction of options for a given reservation characteristic from a wider range of options for that characteristic (e.g., the pre-selection comprising a restriction on the branch location for a reservation from all possible branch locations to a lesser range of branch locations such as only branch locations in the St. Louis metropolitan area).
According to one aspect of the present invention, a customer for which the website maintains a customer profile may be an entity such as a business entity (e.g. corporation or other business organization) or governmental entity (e.g., state government, county government, city/municipal government, governmental agency, etc.). That entity may comprise numerous units, each with its own unique rental vehicle needs. The term “division” will be used herein to refer to such separately classifiable rental vehicle needs of the customer entity. For example, XYZ Corporation may have a sales division located in Los Angeles, a corporate headquarters division located in St. Louis, and a research and development division located in Boston. Through the present invention, division-specific deep-links can be set up for these divisions by defining the pre-selected reservation characteristic(s) for each division and storing these characteristics in a customer profile for the pertinent entity. However, it should be noted that these divisions need not be discrete physically or logically separate units of a business entity as in the example above. For example, a single unit of a business entity may have separately classifiable rental needs in terms of different locations where a recurring need for a rental vehicle reservations exist, different vehicle types for which there is a recurring reservation need, etc.
Through one aspect of the present invention, the different division-specific deep-links for a customer entity can be grouped together for inclusion on one or more multiple deep-link pages. Uniform resource locator(s) (URLs) for the multiple deep-link page(s) can then be provided to the customer entity to streamline and personalize the customer's ability to book rental vehicle reservations through the rental vehicle service provider's website. A plurality of multiple deep-link pages that are customized to a customer profile's multiple divisions can also be nested together such that a link on one multiple deep-link page serves as a link to another multiple deep-link page.
When a multiple deep-link page is displayed on a user computer, the user can then select one of the listed deep-links to advance to a deep-linked page of the website, thereby streamlining the user's path through the website. A “deep-linked page” is a page on which the user lands after selecting a deep-link. The deep-linked page is an intermediate page of the website that the user would normally have to reach after providing some form of input starting from the website's home page (e.g., a “Choose Vehicle Type” page that would normally be reached after user entry on the home page of location data and temporal data for a reservation). A “deep-link page” is a page having a user-selectable deep-link displayed thereon. A “multiple deep-link page” is a page having a plurality of user-selectable deep-links displayed thereon. In instances where one of the deep-links on a multiple deep-link page is a deep-link to another multiple deep-link page, the another multiple deep-link page also serves as a deep-linked page.
According to another aspect of the invention, disclosed herein is an administrative tool for use by an administrator of the rental vehicle reservation booking website to efficiently control the deep-links supported by the website for a plurality of specialized rental vehicle reservations. A rental vehicle reservation that is created through this deep-linking process can be thought of as a “specialized” rental vehicle reservation in that one or more characteristics of the rental vehicle reservation has been defined in advance. This stands in contrast to conventional rental vehicle reservations that would be created by a general visitor to the website who creates a rental vehicle reservation from scratch. Specialized rental vehicle reservations whose characteristics can be administratively controlled by the present invention include the customer profile division reservations discussed above as well as promotional offer rental vehicle reservations. Through this administrative tool, an administrator can access a plurality of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) through which the administrator can define specified characteristics of the specialized reservations and store the defined reservation characteristics in a profiles for the specialized rental vehicle reservations. The administrative tool can also allow the administrator to define uniform resource locators (URLs) for deep-links associated with these specialized rental vehicle reservations, and define customized content to be displayed on the deep-linked pages corresponding to the specialized reservation's deep-links. Upon user selection of these deep-links URLs, the user's reservation can be automatically populated with the pre-selected characteristics stored in the specialized reservation profile corresponding to that deep-link.
Through these GUIs, the pre-selected reservation characteristics (or the ranges therefor) can be positively defined or negatively defined. For example, to positively define that Branch Location A is to be used as the pick-up location for a particular deep-linked reservation, an administrator can positively define Branch Location A as a pre-selected characteristic by selecting Branch Location A, or an administrator can negatively define Branch Location A as a pre-selected characteristic by excluding all branch locations other than Branch Location A from the pre-selected characteristic. While it is generally preferred that positive definitions of pre-selected characteristics be used for reasons of data keying convenience, in some instances a negative definition may be more convenient.
Thus, via this administrative tool, a rental vehicle service provider can create a customized website experience for its customers in a fraction of the time it would have previously taken to provide customers with such an experience. Furthermore, because of the user-friendly nature of the administrative GUIs, the administrator need not be highly knowledgeable with respect to software coding or Internet website design, thereby opening up the role of administrator to a variety of people who can then efficiently serve requests from customers regarding how to personalize those customers' experiences with the website.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon review of the teachings in the following description and drawings.